There’s been a lot of handwringing in the Canadian press over the last forty-eight hours after the photo of Aylan Kurdi dead on the beach went viral. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about and don’t want to see a picture of a dead toddler but also want to know what happened, click here.) A lot of “what can we do” stories. All of the major political party leaders currently engaged in our federal election discussed the issue; Justin Trudeau of the Liberals was clearly and honestly upset, Thomas Mulcair of the NDP was almost crying. John Tory announced that he will personally sponsor a Syrian family for refugee status. There is a sense that Something Will Be Done about this.

Mulcair was promising if the NDP win the election they’ll immediately allow an additional 10,000 Syrian refugees into Canada. Trudeau upped it to 25,000. Those numbers would represent a vast improvement over Canada’s current and nearly non-existent contribution (2,300 as of last week). Those numbers also represent a pathetic, nearly non-existent response to the Syrian refugee crisis. They can be both at the same time.

Stephen Harper also spoke yesterday on the Syrian refugee crisis and, because he is Canada’s answer to Richard Nixon, lied through his teeth in order to provide a sense of righteousness to Canadian voters. Using misleading metrics he pretended that Canada takes in a disproportionately high number of refugees, which it does not – and then, of course, he explained that the crisis just demonstrates how necessary Canada’s participation in the military action against ISIS is, because so far as Harper is concerned everything demonstrates how Canada’s participation in the military action is terribly important, down to and including his breakfast grapefruit.

All of those responses – Mulcair and Trudeau’s well-intentioned but wholly inadequate promises, Harper’s misdirection to re-emphasize that the real problem is the one he wants to deal with – are a result of one simple fact: this country does not care about poor Syrian refugees, and the entire political class knows it.

Canada accepts far fewer asylum seekers per capita than most first-world countries. As an counter-example, Germany plans to accept over eight hundred thousand refugees this year. Granted, Germany’s population is two and a half times that of Canada’s – but proportionally speaking, Canada could accept 200,000 refugees and still not be accepting as many per capita as Germany is. We take in a paltry amount of refugees, which is all the more embarrassing because Canada used to be at the forefront of refugee homing; in 1986 we became the first country to ever be awarded the UNHCR’s Nansen Refugee Award, typically given to individuals – we’re still the only country that has ever received it – because we housed so many refugees (including over 110,000 Vietnamese boat people).

And the reason we don’t any more is that at some point, Canada The Good fundamentally stopped caring about other people.

Yes, everybody is horrified by the picture of Aylan Kurdi and the idea of drowning children, but the Syrian refugee crisis has been international news for months now and a large part of that story has been the fact that thousands of refugees were drowning while trying to travel by sea to potential safety. Aylan Kurdi is not the first drowned Syrian child refugee; he will not be the last drowned Syrian child refugee. He’s not even the first drowned Syrian child to be photographed; here, for example, you can click on a story from almost two years ago and see a drowned Syrian child refugee. And in time, Canadians will manage to forget about that photo of Aylan Kurdi.

Trudeau and Mulcair know full well that 10,000 and 25,000 are amazingly inadequate numbers for dealing with this crisis. They’re not stupid. Stephen Harper knows it too, and as much as I dislike Stephen Harper I do in fact believe that he feels awful about this. But they all also know that if they proposed a truly proportional response to the Syrian refugee crisis – or the Rohingya refugee crisis, or the Nigerian refugee crisis, or the Congolese refugee crisis, or the Malinese refugee crisis, or even the hey-they’re-white Ukrainian refugee crisis – and said “Canada can reasonably afford to settle several hundred thousand refugees here,” they would be political toast. A large and politically active number of Canadians have become able to care about other people only to the point where the costs of caring about them do not significantly impact them: whether that impact comes in the form of slightly higher taxes or depressed home values because all these Syrians moved in across the street doesn’t really matter. Hell, I’m doing it right now because I was refusing to post a link to the picture of the dead kid, so you know what, here you go. Click on it and look at it, because morally speaking, you probably deserve to look at it.

I don’t know what the answer is; I’m not even going to pretend to guess. But Canada has become a grasping, selfish country. Some might say it’s the result of decades of conservatism or neoliberalism or whatever; I think that gives those philosophies too much credit. I think it’s simple: if you give people an excuse to be selfish, then as a general rule they will be. We’re pack animals, maybe, but pack animals don’t think in terms of the species, only the immediate pack. And we have trouble even managing the latter.

Really, the last month for me has been work and Torontoist municipal election stuff – a lot more is coming down the pike this week – and I will be so glad once the damn election is over, you have no idea.

(sorry for the delay – last week was supposed to be my vacation, but I was doing all this instead, so I took Labour Day off to do no labouring, and then Tuesday I came back to work and BAM look at all the things that needed catch-up).

So recently there has been a kerfuffle of sorts, because WWE announced they were bringing the WWE Network to Canada. Now, this should have been a slam dunk, no-miss proposition. Canada has always been a hotbed of wrestling fandom: obvious easy market, obvious profit. Right?

Except that the WWE Network has partnered with Rogers Canada, one of the biggest cable providers in the country, and literally removed every single thing that was good about the Network from the Canadian version. To wit:

ASPECT

ORIGINAL AMERICAN VERSION

INFERIOR CANADIAN VERSION

Cost

$9.99 per month

$11.99 per month

Method of delivery

Over-the-top via internet to computers/XBoxen/Rokus/etc.

Premium on-demand cable channel

Availability

Anybody who can pay for it

Rogers subscribers only (which means MORE THAN HALF THE COUNTRY can't get it and those who can have to sign up with a specific cable company to do so)

How one can watch

Computer/TV/Tablet/phone

TV only

Back catalog

Every pay-per-view ever and thousands of hours of TV footage

Literally only eight pay-per-views at launch

I’m not kidding about the lack of back content either. Take a look at this:

Here is how the archive is labelled – looks like a total rush job, I expected stripped down version but this is low pic.twitter.com/REXz71VO4P

(The full list of launch content, incidentally: SummerSlam 1992, 1998, 2000, 2002 and 2005, Great American Bash 1989, Bash at the Beach 1994, 1996 and 1998, ECW Heatwave 1998 and 1999, and ECW One Night Stand 2005.)

So it’s a horrible botch job and Canadians who want the proper WWE Network will just have to not use the American service via a VPN because that would be wrong, but really, we can’t reasonably blame WWE for this, because Rogers owns the TV rights to WWE in Canada and because of that you had to know that, from the get-go, they would come in and ruin the Network for Canadians because it’s Rogers.

See, thanks to the way the Canadian telecommunications industry is regulated and operated, Rogers literally does not have to give a damn. Rogers is one of three companies – the others being Bell and Shaw – that dominates 90% of internet provision in Canada. It is also one of three companies (the others being Bell and Shaw) that dominates television in Canada. Out of the 60 or so channels that make up most “basic premium cable” packages in Canada, the Big Three own thirty-two of them. (Another twelve are American-owned, eight are owned by a corporation called Corus Entertainment, and eight others are either publicly operated or independently owned.) While we’re at it, Bell and Rogers control about 65% of the mobile phone market in Canada (a third company, Telus, controls about another 25%).

These companies don’t have to worry about somebody out-competing them because they have completely regulatory-captured the CRTC (Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission). If you want a mobile phone? There’s no such thing as Bell, Rogers or Telus offering a better rate than the other; down the line, their rates and services are virtually identical. They all have budget carrier brands as well: those match up just the same too. TV services? Barely any measurable difference between the 2-3 options you have anywhere in Canada (usually one of Rogers and Shaw, plus Bell). Internet? Same shit, different day. Most of the “independent” ISPs in Canada are actually re-sellers who buy bandwidth from Bell or Rogers at cost (the big guys are legally forced to offer pipe at cost for resale otherwise they wouldn’t do it) so even if you have an indie ISP like Teksavvy, Bell and Rogers are still getting your money.

The net result of all of this is that internet/TV/wireless in Canada is a bad joke, has been for basically ever, and barring a major sea change in regulatory attitudes it’s never going to change – heck, right now Bell and Rogers are running ads on their own TV and radio stations under the guise of a “consumer advocacy group” that additional competition in their marketplace would “kill Canadian jobs” so they’re loading the deck as we speak. It’s ridiculous and awful and everybody knows it’s ridiculous and awful, but no politician is ever going to campaign on it because did I mention that Bell and Rogers own all those TV channels? Including multiple news channels? Amazing how that works.

So the WWE Network in Canada was always going to suck. Because we can’t have nice things here, not in the telecom sense.

Over at Torontoist, we’re doing a series of fact-checks of mayoral candidates’ policy speeches. We just recently did Olivia Chow, who was unsurprisingly pretty accurate. (My idea to enliven the post with a series of GIFs of adorable dogs was shot down.)

I also wrote a look forward for Ontario’s political parties over the next four to five years. And now, all I have to worry about is the municipal election! And a potential federal election next year probably!

Norm Wilner, who I like and respect greatly, recently wrote a screed regarding Rob Ford and why he needs to be saved. It’s not an uncommon sentiment among those who do not like Rob Ford. If he’d only get some help is said so often with respect to Rob Ford that it deserves to be acronymized, frankly, and it’s not surprising that this is the case: after all, if you consider addiction to be a disease (which it is), then it becomes harder to assign Ford moral fault for suffering from that disease. Diseases need treatment, not condemnation, and this is why so many political enemies of Rob Ford have been urging him to go seek treatment, even if it only means a temporary leave from office rather than the permanent exile from politics Rob Ford deserves.

1/2 i was told three years ago by a t.o. city councillor that they all knew ford was drunk at work every day, and that he bought a mickey…

The problem is this: addiction is morally neutral, but how a person chooses to deal with that addiction is not. There is a way to live with addiction responsibly and soberly (or at least as soberly as possible – part of addiction is the constant threat of relapse). Rob Ford, as Norm rightly notes, has never dealt with his obvious problems in a responsible manner. Even now, when he publicly admits to having been flagrantly smashed in public, he’s not admitting to any real problem. “I’m just going to stop” is not the answer of someone who admits to addiction. It’s the answer of someone pretending he’s not. This is vintage spoiled-child Rob Ford, and it was what most of us expected him to do.

2/2 at the dundas lcbo on his drive home each day and poured it into a slurpee cup and drank it as he drove home.

Here’s the thing: we expected him to do it because Rob Ford is not a good person. I don’t just mean he’s weak – although he is weak, that much is certain – because weakness, in and of itself, could be forgiven. But in addition to being weak, Rob Ford is a bully. He’s mean. He’s not just stupid; he’s proudly ignorant. He’s arrogant. He’s rude. He’s a hypocrite. He’s a liar. He has a pronounced violent streak that he barely controls in public; Norm says Rob Ford is an “accident waiting to happen” but the police have responded to multiple domestic disturbances at Ford’s home over the years and there is a fair case to be made that the “accidents” are potentially not theoretical at this point.

And if you think that last sentence is speculative, you have to understand this: Norm works in journalism, as do I (well, as a sideline), and we talk with our fellow journalists all the time, and here is the thing: what is being said, publicly, about Rob Ford is quite literally only the tip of the iceberg. Rob Ford’s public alcoholism has been an open secret for literally years; drug use falls into the same area, where everybody knows it happens but nobody can report on it because, after all, if the mayor purely hypothetically speaking stumbles out of a bathroom with white powder on his face, you can’t prove it’s cocaine, and if you don’t have a picture then you can’t even prove it happens. If it had happened, of course. Similarly, if one of the videos the police recovered off those hard drives was the newest candidate for “worst four-word sentence in the English language,” by which we mean “Rob Ford sex tape,” then that’s strictly hypothetical too. Completely hypothetical. And we certainly can’t say if Rob Ford hypothetically uses the services of prostitutes.

And that’s just the light hypothetical stuff. I’m not going to go into the heavier stuff. That way lies madness and accusations of open, active criminality.

this cnclr. also said ford slept in his office all day, usually taking one meeting. he said they all thought he would be dead within a year.

I understand compassion and most of the time I preach it. But compassion, when applied to the cold hard necessities of politics, cannot and should not be an endless well. (Hell, even outside of politics someone who actively commits harm – and Rob Ford does commit harm, on many levels – cannot be given compassionate treatment when you need them to stop.) Rob Ford does “not need to be saved.” He needs to be put out of his political misery and exiled from public life. Permanently. I have no sympathy for him, no pity; so many people have done so much more with so much less than Rob Ford it is just sort of laughable. He has been given every chance and he has squandered all of them. He deserves only scorn.